Ridley Scott’s Prometheus

With its stunning H. R. Giger designs and first-rate cast, Ridley Scott’s classic Alien (1979) is imaginative, visually striking, immensely atmospheric, and sometimes just plain terrifying. Together with its worthy but very different sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it spawned a vast pop-culture “franchise” (which is Hollywood-speak for a mythos) including two unworthy sequels, Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, plus two Z-grade Alien vs. Predator movies, plus scores of often excellent Aliens comics and novels (yes, I read a slew of them in the ’90s), and now Ridley Scott’s prequel Prometheus.

Prometheus is a visually dazzling movie (particularly in 3-D), but it is very disappointing on every other level.

On the most superficial level, it was so gross that I was reduced to dry heaves at one point – which I why I don’t feel any compunction about “spoiling” the plot, such as it is. So consider yourself warned.

The deepest disappointment is that Prometheus severs the tap root that has nourished the vast and ramifying Alien cosmos: mystery. In Alien, the beacon, the crashed ship, the “space jockey,” and the aliens themselves are all deeply mysterious. But it is not an unpleasant mystery, crying out for answers. Indeed, the mystery is part of the fun. It contributes to the atmosphere. This is why Alien is essentially a supernatural, haunted-house thriller, despite the sci-fi trappings.

Unfortunately, these trappings have invited the “there’s got to be a rational explanation for this” people to chime in and try to explain the mystery away. And, to make matters worse, these vulgarians are so cynical that their rational explanation is completely incoherent. But they are apparently counting on special effects to sufficiently stupefy their audience — if they are not already stupid enough — so that nobody will ask questions.

We learn in Prometheus that the space-jockeys are just giant humanoids under their mysterious exoskeleton-like suits and helmets.

We learn that they came to Earth, apparently billions of years ago, and seeded it with life when one of them drank a dark liquid which caused him to dismember and dissolve into a lake. Yet somehow, his scattered DNA became our DNA, apparently skipping a few million generations of what we know as evolution.

Yes, a dismembered giant is part of the Norse creation myth. But don’t get too excited: there are a lot of myths alluded to in this movie, but they are there merely to gild its vacuous plot, like the iridescent sheen of a soap bubble wrapped around a void.

Oddly enough, although the space jockeys’ only connection to us is DNA, ancient peoples somehow had memories of them, which they expressed in their art, giving us a map to the planet from whence they came. (But wait, it turns out to be not the planet from which they came billions of years ago, but a planet where they established a bio-weapons facility operating only a couple thousand years ago.)

I know, it is just a farrago of ancient astronaut lore, but it is put forward as post-religious, pseudo-scientific substitute for creation myths to explain how we got here. (But who created the space gods?)

In 2089, two archaeologists, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Noomi Rapace, the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, looking here like a young Jennifer Saunders) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green), find a 35,000-year-old star map in Scotland. They convince aged and ailing trillionaire Peter Weyland to fund a space mission to the planet that appears on the star map, where they claim we will find the “Engineers” of life on Earth. Weyland funds the mission, hoping that our makers will restore his health (!).

Why did Scott cast the young and handsome Guy Pearce as Weyland, under loads of fake-looking makeup and prosthetics, rather than just hire a genuine old man? It is not like the role, which is hardly more than a bit part, required special acting abilities, or that Pearce even has such abilities. Hell, the CGI department could have whipped up a more plausible performance.

Five years later, the spaceship Prometheus arrives at a small moon orbiting a larger planet. They set down near some domed cyclopean structures that resemble the weathered stumps of immense rugose cones. The scientists enter the structures and find a decapitated space jockey. Elizabeth Shaw and one of the extras take his well-preserved head back to the ship to examine it. For no apparent reason, the head oozes and explodes just like the original space jockey who seeded Earth. DNA analysis proves that he is human.

Meanwhile, David, a rather fey, blonde, and treacherous android played by Michael Fassbender (just like the treacherous android in Alien played by Ian Holm), has spirited away one of the many cylinders found near the dead space jockey, cylinders that for no apparent reason begin to ooze a black liquid. For no apparent reason, David puts a bit of the black ooze in a drink and offers it to Charlie Holloway, who for no apparent reason is drunk and despondent after making the greatest discovery in human history. Charlie then has sex with Elizabeth, who is sterile, so there is no need of a space condom. Post coitus, Charlie starts feeling ill.

The next day, the team returns to the domed structure to find one of the members they left behind dead and the other missing. David goes off on his own and finds the bridge of a buried spaceship. He activates the navigation program. Then he finds a living space jockey in stasis. It it is the most visually stunning sequence in the film.

Charlie is now quite ill and mutating. Ice queen Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) refuses to let him back on the ship and then sets him on fire at Charlie’s urging. (In Prometheus, all the really evil characters are blonde.)

Elizabeth apparently passes out. When she wakes up, David explains that she is quite pregnant with a rather unusual fetus. She wants an abortion, but David sedates her and tells her they will put her back in suspended animation. Elizabeth escapes and climbs into a surgery machine, cuts her stomach open, and extracts a kind of writhing cephalopod. A few abdominal staples later, she is on her feet and back in action, albeit in her underwear and covered with gore. (Eat light before viewing, and you can enjoy dry heaves like I did.)

We learn that Mr. Weyland is on board. He is awakened from suspended animation in order to meet the Engineer. In case you are wondering what these stupid and venal white people (and their white android) have gotten themselves into, the crusty but big-hearted black ship’s captain explains it all: this is not the home world of the space jockeys. This is a facility where they developed biological weapons of mass destruction. Their weapons, however, got out of hand and destroyed them (ho hum).

Later we learn from David that the weapons were meant to destroy Earth. It seems that, for no apparent reason, our creators had a change of heart and decided to destroy the planet.

Elizabeth urges the captain not to allow these weapons to get off the planet, no matter what. The captain agrees.

Still feeling the staples, Elizabeth suits up and accompanies David, Weyland, and some others to the ship to awaken the space jockey. David assures them that he has deconstructed the ancient languages of the world to a root tongue that is presumably the language of the space jockeys. How this is possible, given that their only apparent contribution to Earth is DNA, is not explained.

They awaken the space jockey. David says “kalifee” or some such. But apparently that is not an acceptable greeting, so, for no apparent reason, the space jockey rips David’s head off, then kills Weyland and some of the others. Elizabeth, despite some cramps and oozing about the staples, manages to escape.

As she runs back to the Prometheus, the space jockey activates his ship and begins to take off. Elizabeth tells the black captain to stop him, and he nobly immolates himself and his crew to save humanity by crashing the Prometheus into the departing alien craft. The ice queen Meredith Vickers has ejected her quarters (complete with surgical bay) from the Prometheus, but she is crushed by the falling alien craft. (This is probably her karmic retribution for having sex with the black captain.) David, who just keeps talking even after his head has been ripped off his shoulders, and the space jockey both survive the crash. Elizabeth takes refuge in Meredith’s quarters.

David, for no apparent reason, informs her that the space jockey, for no apparent reason, is on his way to get her. How a severed head could ascertain his destination and intent is not explained. Perhaps he read it in the script. When the space jockey attacks, Elizabeth opens the door to the surgical bay, and her unwanted fetus with the tentacles, now grown horribly large, overwhelms the space jockey and sends a tube down his throat, implanting an alien embryo.

It is a rather complex reproductive cycle.

Elizabeth rescues the now nice David (both parts of him). He tells her there are other alien craft, and he can pilot them. Elizabeth sets up a warning beacon to keep people away and then leaves in search of the space jockey home world. She wants to find out why they chose to destroy humanity, and she apparently thinks they will tell her (before they destroy her).

At this point, we expect that the space jockey with the alien inside him will trudge back to his ship, put his uniform back on, climb back into his chair, and then the alien will burst from his chest, which is how he is found in the original Alien movie. But that would make too much sense, so it doesn’t happen.

Fin

As the credits rolled, I took off my 3-D glasses and rubbed by eyes in disbelief, trying to fathom the vulgarity of spirit behind this godawful movie. It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took the mysteries of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and gave us Peter Hyam’s sequel 2010 (1984), where the monoliths work to prevent nuclear war. It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took “the Force” of the original Star Wars trilogy and explained it in terms of little measurable material widgets called “midichlorians” in The Phantom Menace (1999). It is the same vulgarity of spirit that took the mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and gave us Rick Rosenthal’s made-for-TV sequel The Birds II: Land’s End (1994), in which we are informed that the bird attacks are due to pollution.

Heidegger tells us that this vulgarization is the essence of modernity, which seeks to abolish all mystery and transcendence, replacing them with the transparent and available, which in cultural terms boils down to the vulgar and the trite.

But some of us are more modern than others, and it all fell into place when I spied the name of screenwriter Damon Lindelof, one of the principal culprits behind Lost, the longest, most cynical Jewish jerk-job in television history. Lost was masterful in sucking people in by layering mystery upon mystery, including elements of religion, myth, and science fiction. But it was ultimately arbitrary and incoherent, revealing a bottomless contempt for its audience. All of these elements were chosen merely for effect, without concern for coherence and meaning, without the slightest suggestion that they could be taken seriously, that they mean anything important, that they are anything more than boob bait. Prometheus is the same kind of portentous swindle: just Jews making millions peddling myths for morons.

Don’t lose your money, or your lunch, at Prometheus.

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48 Comments

what is with all these racial hangups, dude. it was the writing that never happened, not the “lesser orders” of humanity that pertain. you are flying a bit far afield yourself. ok. visually perfect. aimlessly imaginative, and logically incoherent. puzzle. however, the instant i fell upon the term “lost” it became, when combined with the author’s name, obvious how prometheus got transformed from a coherent story into a feature length soap opera/x files hybridized television episode (suggesting everything, and explaining nothing). this made worse by ridley’s attempt to “strand” alien elements into a new story that takes as its beginning point aI’s mystery moon. in this mundane way prometheus bound for a story that could have been made interesting in so many ways, degenerates into prometheus bound and gagged upon arrival.

Ridley Scott isn’t a Jew or religious. In fact, he has recently stated that he believes
religion is the source of all problems in the world. IN FACT…
He even made a movie about it. Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut. (Masterpiece)

I wouldn’t say it didn’t make any sense – whoever said that, I think, wasn’t really paying attention. That doesn’t mean it was great, however.

Ridley Scott jumped the shark long ago. The only film of his since the 1980s that I’ve enjoyed was “Black Hawk Down.” He’s also been threatening to make a “prequel” to “Blade Runner,” which is probably best left alone.

It’s part of our culture, whether we like or not. This is besides the fact that anyone who is living in America today, unless they are living in a cave somewhere, is supporting the “system” that includes Hollywood, so whether they sell a few movie tickets more or less isn’t going to have any effect.

I saw this movie today and walked out before the end. What a load of c&^%p.

The movie didn’t make any sense. None, zip. nada, nothing. That’s the bottom line. No plot, no real story, just various ‘cool’ story parts stitched together with special effects. The movie embodied ‘meaninglessness’. Plus there were the usual production features:

The alphas were the women and the black captain…
The leading white guy gets drunk right after they make the most momentous discovery in human history…
The black captain wears a bathrobe, cuz he’s keepin’ it real….
the entire crew appears to have been recruited from yuppie slackers

The show really was all about the Kali Yuga, but not as the theme of the movie, but rather as an expression of the fallen spirit that could ‘create’ (?) such a vacuous work of Dreck.

P.S . Yes , the “evil ” gods were white and looked like Greco – Roman sculptures , and all the “bad ” people were blonde , just like in that new Snow white film , just like in the Harry Potter films …just as Hollywoods new Evil Whitey is Sean Bean ( The Hitcher ) who has replaced Rutger Hauer ( The Hitcher ) the bonus with Mr Hauer is that he has an evil German name , as has Fassbender …

I was so glad to see that Mr Lynch had written a review of this crap . I saw it today online and once again was glad that I didnt botherspending almost £ 10 to see it at a cinema .

Most of my points have been made by the other commenters ; the absolutely unnecessary inter-racial sex thing , the boss of course being another tuff woman , the movie being in many ways just a remake of the original ( creature bursts from belly , woman spends a long time in her knickers etc ), the awful dialogue , the ludicrous plot-holes and logical nonsenses , the way the so-called scientists seemed to act with zero professional protocol ( the guy who started cooing and fawning over the snakey -cobra -thing ….just LUDICROUS !! ) the fact that the 2 scientists were stranded overnight and werent being monitored cos the ice queen boss and the noble negro were gettin jiggy widdit , the fact that their deaths werent recorded ! , the fact that a surgical pod was mysteriously equipped with a blast freezer ! , on and on .

One scene that has been overlooked here is where the droid removes the womans cross /crucifix , saying ” I’ll have to take taht thing , it might be contaminated ” Very subtle , not .

Mr Lynch is right , the ” lifecycle ” of these things is VERY compicated …its an egg ( laid by what ) that becomes a ” facegrabber ” which implants something ( what ? ) into a host , this thing then bursts out , and returns a few hours later having fully matured to a height of 7 feet tall ..it has acid for blood , and therefore has to be careful not to bite it’s tongue , which is easier said than done , as it’s tongue has teeth ….

I watched a copy online which was not great , so much of the ” stunning visuals ” were lost . It did however allow me to see the film for what it is : Rubbish , another Trojan Horse carrying jew viruses.

I stopped watching movies many years ago.They offend me not only with their vulgarity but the feeling that producers must think that people are stupid and are entertained with trash.It seemed to me that they also had some message to pass. Sometimes I thought either the producers were on drugs or implicitly wanted to promote drugs in order to experience “hidden reality”.

I don’t know if he has seen it but he should review the 1995 dark comedy film The Last Supper that is about liberal students of mixed race and ethnicity that invite people with conservative/right wing views over for a meal every Sunday and over the course of the meal decide to whether to poison them or not.

That’s a shame. Aliens was much, much better. Essentially a movie about a brave White mother figure killing black rapists. Mestizo dyke, Shylock Jew, and Kaffir Seargent were slain. A young White corporal enters manhood through overthrowing a Judaic (Let’s nuke it from orbit!). Prometheus might be a good excuse to get drunk at the movies.

It might be worth noting that the bull dyke mestiza Vasquez in Aliens was played by the Jewess Jenette Goldstein. She seems to have colored her skin in order to play the part. I suppose that if a White actor were to color their skin in order to look like a non-White, the same people who never tire of proclaiming that “race is skin-deep” would find this intolerably “racist.”

In the future, in any group of at least 3 people, exactly one of them is Black. The others are all white- in the future, demographic trends resulting in whites being 8% and shrinking have either reversed, or affirmative action has ended. The Black man is wise and courageous, bold and sexy. It appears that the only reason Blacks don’t procreate more and supplant the craven, stupid, weak white breed is that they are too noble- they always end up blowing up to save the others.

Perhaps if the entire crew was Black, they could have explored the planet without everyone dying, and had intelligent, thoughtful conversations about the themes that were raised. Hopefully this will serve as a warning to would-be eugenicists, so that we can have an all-Black future.

Yes, but Shaw’s religion, like all the other “significant” stuff in this film, treated in the shallowest possible fashion. It is just there for effect, like questions about our makers, questions about what it is to be human, etc. Its just pseudo-profundity, mere boob bait to keep the goyim gawking, and talking, and swiping their cards.

Another analogy is the Wachowsky brothers’ Matrix movies, especially the last two, which are filled with mythic references without any larger meaning or goal than to create an impression of pseudo-profundity. The first movie worked, but the mask slipped in the last two.

I was surprised at the scene where the main female character (Charlize Theron), in the film, a highly strung bitch queen from hell, overseeing the whole voyage on behalf of the Company, who in one scene, suddenly concedes to the sexual advances of the black ship’s captain – this scene has no bearing on the plot or narrative and served no purpose other than to just simply say to the viewer ‘Hey, we’re going to remind you that white women sometimes have sex with black men.’ (the majority of filmgoers are, in the West, of course, young white males for the same reason the majority of clothes buyers in the West are young white women but cultural Marxists will perceive this to be symptoms of a greater evil.)

Then, there was the inevitable reference to the Holocaust when talking about how one of the space jockeys, whilst presumably retreating from the Aliens, got piled up against one of the spawning room doors, and was decapitated. Again, an intergalactic, cosmic space story about man’s origins has to remind the audience of the holocaust!?!?!?

Nonetheless, rather surprisingly, like the original poster stated, the original space jockeys looked very much like ancient Greek god statues and then, there was the scene where the android, David (Michael Fassbender) was learning humanity’s history in anticipation of waking up the cryogenically induced sleeping crew in order to guide them in exploration of the discovered planet where the space jockey was located; the scene where he talks about Indo-European sub-strates?? I was surprised at the inclusion of this. What exactly were the scriptwriters stating here?…that Indo-Europeans were the originators of ALL culture?

Re: Guy Pearce – apparently, there are many scenes which include Guy Pearce when young ,but these got cut from the final edit. Apparently, we’ll have to wait til Scott’s director’s cut (and the others!) comes out.

As for the Dark Horse comics, whilst fun, with the occasional cool idea, overall they weren’t that great IMHO.

CosmicSurfer, I really only meant the first three series of Dark Horse “Aliens” comics – the trilogy that deals with the aliens finally getting through to Earth and taking over, and then the aftermath. The stories were well thought-out, the themes from the first two films were explored in much greater depth than anything done in the films that have come out since then, and the art was quite good as well. I know Dark Horse continued to produce more “Aliens” comics after those, but I agree that, at least based on the ones I saw, they were quite disappointing.

Good point. That how I felt about Ray Bradbury’s attempt at a sequel to his numinous “Dandelion Wine”. It was a vulgar explanation. I felt it quickly and put down the book without going on. I wish I was always so perceptive – I got sucked into Lost at various points.

Explanation without destroying the Mystery is possible, but it required an Epic, complete with Theology, History, etc. Tolkien in other words who meditate for decades on the both the Main Theme and the details that would not detract from it but only add. For example which ancient Norse, Anglo Saxon, or Finnish root would sound best as an Elven word. All this was utterly alien to Bradbury and he should have been content with his own small but very real genius.

The Phantom Menace was one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen, even by Star Wars standards. But for me the nadir was the revelation that the Force was connected to little material widgets call midichlorians.

It’s all part of this “ancient astronauts” crap that really irritates me. There’s a whole cable channel devoted to it, a sure sign of its cultural salience, like all the “house” shows during the real estate boom.

It’s all part of the Reign of Quantity, as Guenon diagnoses it. The complete inability to understand anything non-material, and the consequent “search for explanations” only on the material plane. Oh, Matu Pichu was a landing strip….NOW I understand!”

Guenon’s first books were on Theosophy and Spiritualism, and already he was pointing out — quite amusing, actually — the gross materialism involved: visions of the afterlife as essentially colonizing new planets, calculating how big the “spirit farms” would need to be to support the families, etc.

Guenon also pointed out that Mormonism was exactly the same: the secret doctrines they don’t like to talk about, like how “God” is just a really smart human, who lives on his own planet somewhere, and the Mormon saints will get their own planets as well, etc. Essentially, the cosmology of Battlestar Galactica. Same with Scientology: the Galactic Emperor [Star Wars!] shoves everyone into a volcano [why?] and sets off a bunch of A-bombs, people fly around in B-52 type “space planes” etc. What sort of infantile mentality thinks this is “more real” than Sunday School?

Forget about the Jews. The Mormons have their own state, 10% of the Senate, and as likely as not the next President. Prepare for a whole culture of space opera nonsense.

“Listen, Bradbury, this would be a whole lot better if you told us more about the fuel… and where the space food chips come from!”

The Mormons have their own state, 10% of the Senate, and as likely as not the next President.

Not too shabby for a people who fought starvation in the winter of 1847, and beyond.

The linking of their metapolitical system with a temporal bridge to the metapolitical order is something that seems to work for them, and would certainly work for us.

I have long maintained that Smith and Young were Initiates; Smith, basically perverting Traditional Doctrine to meet his personal desires for aggrandizement, and Young, transforming Traditional Doctrine to build a nation-state out of the desert, literally forming Our Beloved Deseret out of…dust, that had Life breathed into it by Will.

And, for all of the LDS worship (small “w”) of Joseph Smith, note that its most effective temporal Institution supporting the Church is Brigham Young University, and not Joseph Smith University.

There’s a reason for that, and its one we can learn from.

Young never dared challenge the government head-on. Yes, there was the skirmish of Johnson’s War, but Young sidestepped Leviathan, and his Posterity seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

I also thought that Trevor’s idea about all the botched “mystery” shows and films, such as Lost, was spot on. There may be something conspiratorial in that, or perhaps just incompetence. The only show that sort-of managed to pull it off was the new Battlestar Galactica, because they never fully explained the mystery behind the series (although they did teeter dangerously close to cheesiness towards the end).

I admit that I thought the first three seasons of Lost were great. As with any show, however, there is only a certain amount you can explain before it just turns into camp, which is what happened starting in the fourth season. And the finale was pretty ridiculous.

A good review, Trevor. I liked the movie slightly more than you did, but agree with you about all its faults. You didn’t even mention the fact that half of the scenes in the movie, and even some of the dialogue, were merely rehashes of the first film. And a lot of the stuff with Weyland was clearly an homage to “Blade Runner.” (Is a director really allowed to make homages to himself?)

Due to the usual inefficiency at the Indian ticket counter, I missed the first 5 minutes of the film, so I didn’t recognize all of the gaping plot holes that you pointed out. That definitely takes the film down a couple of notches for me. I did find it interesting that the super-intelligent aliens turn out to be be strongly reminiscent of extremely large Norsemen, however. Although, naturally, they were evil.

If anyone really wanted to produce a worthy successor to “Alien”/”Aliens”, all they had to do was to make a few films out of the outstanding “Aliens” comics that were published by Dark Horse in the late 1980s, and to which you also alluded. In both art and storytelling, they far outshadow anything that Hollywood has been able to add to the “Alien” mythos since then.

You can look at Roman art and see Rome’s decline reflected in its art. Roman art after about 300 AD is very degraded compared to Roman art from earlier times. If art reflects cultural values, then it’s amazing Hollywood gives us any quality content ever. It seems we are having to wait longer and longer between good films. Within the science fiction and fantasy genres, Hollywood often made good films as recently as the 80s. Ridley Scott directed Alien and Blade Runner almost back to back. James Cameron directed The Terminator. While it’s not a deep and brilliant film like 2001 or LOTR, it’s still iconic and was ahead of its time in dealing with AI and dystopia.

“Within the science fiction and fantasy genres, Hollywood often made good films as recently as the 80s. Ridley Scott directed Alien and Blade Runner almost back to back. James Cameron directed The Terminator. While it’s not a deep and brilliant film like 2001 or LOTR, it’s still iconic and was ahead of its time in dealing with AI and dystopia.”

1997 and 98 had two of the best sci-fi films with Gattaca and Dark City.

I too was very disappointed (and repulsed) by it. The one scene I’m surprised you didn’t mention was the one in which one of the crew members, reincarnated in a zombie-like state, returns to the ship to commence a series of violent attacks which have no real relevance on the story at all.

It was also curious that the three aliens we see (the one in the opening scene, the one in suspended sleep, and the decapitated head of the one which eventually explodes during testing) all look identical. I wonder if this was intentional or carelessness on the part of the film crew.

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